The broccoli incident of '11

Monster Line is our second control game. It was all about solving equations, but in mental math kind of way.

I actually like this mechanic quite a bit. There are monsters attacking your city. It's up to the player to use math to aim his towers to hit the monsters. Since all the things in the game live on the number line, the player just has to enter the number that will get the turret to hit the monsters number. It's essentially an algebra problem: 5+x=32. The player enters the number and fires. After all the towers have been fired, the monsters march a little closer to the city center.

Originally it would randomly generate levels, but you'd occasionally get one that couldn't be won. I nerfed the level generator a bit so all the levels can be beaten and called that endless mode. We also let our math experts script the initial setup in XML. The game reads those XML files and makes the levels in the game. We have some vicious math experts, and thus some pretty vicious levels.

Again, we'll see how this one performs since we didn't have time to test out the math content first. In case you're wondering, the broccoli incident relates to debate about what the towers should shoot at the monsters. For political reasons, we couldn't use broccoli.